“The Boy on the Porch,” Sharon Creech’s latest novel, is a heart-tugging story about a young man and a young woman who discover a boy asleep in a chair on the porch of their remote farm house.

What happens next is a tentative journey into becoming a family. So much of that journey is familiar to any new parent who’s held a baby still wet from the womb:

“It did not seem right to wake him. For the next several hours, they moved about more quietly than usual, until at last John said, ‘It is time to wake that child, Marta. Maybe he is sick, sleeping so much like that.’
” ‘You think so?’ She felt his forehead, but it was cool, not feverish.
“They made small noises: they coughed and tapped their feet upon the floor, and they let the screen door flap shut in its clumsy way, but still the child slept.
” ‘Tap him,’ John said. ‘Tap him on the back.'”

When he does wake up, the boy remains as silent as he was when he slept. But in a hundred small ways, he and the couple learn to communicate, and their speechless relationship thrives and blooms.

The question of where the boy came from, and to whom he belongs, hangs over the story like a thundercloud. Eventually, the authorities learn about this silent child and the couple who has taken him in. Reluctantly, Marta and John dutifully search for the boy’s family.

And then a man shows up, claiming to be the boy’s father.

“The Boy on the Porch” is a quiet, powerful story of discovery, loss and the promise of redemption. (It would make a terrific Christmas gift for readers who revel in metaphor, even when the metaphor may — or may not — be intended as they interpret it.) It maps out the way so many of us fall in love, and the dance between frustration and longing as we try to puzzle out how to please those we hold closest to our hearts.

“The Boy on the Porch” may be the finest story Creech has ever written, better than her Newbery Award-winning “Walk Two Moons” and her Newbery Honor-winner “The Wanderer.” It’s written for young readers, but it will speak to anyone who’s been a parent or a caregiver.